On February 6th, 2023, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Türkiye and Syria causing hundreds of thousands of casualties and almost 57,000 fatalities. The two main hospitals of Antakya (capital of the Hatay province, 1,686,043 inhabitants) were strongly damaged and not operational from the day of disaster. The EMT2-ITA Regione Piemonte (EMT2-ITA) deployed its field hospital in Antakya and became operative on February 2023, the 17th.

The objective of this study is to perform a descriptive analysis of the EMT2-ITA mission in Türkiye, to better prepare the teams for future missions.

Starting from the paper patient records and the surgical procedures logbook, a chart review was conducted: the anonymous data of the patient records were manually entered into an electronic data collection form by healthcare staff (nurses supervised by doctors). Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the database.

A total of 5,459 triage admissions were recorded during the 29 days of activity: almost all the admissions (4,952; 90.7%) were not critical patients (white or green codes), with only few cases (507; 9,3%) needing urgent or immediate care (yellow and red codes).

The EMT2-ITA performed a total of 51 surgical operations (orthopedic, gynecological, general, and maxillofacial surgery). The mother-child emergency was important too, with 31 births and 23% (1281) of pediatric patients.

The data collected show that the main activity of EMT2-ITA in Türkiye was the full commitment to support and maintain the ordinary health care capacity of the affected country.